Slack V1 Integration Guide

Slack is a powerful chat tool that can be used by organizations to tie various services into a single communications platform. Slack makes it easy to communicate with your team. This integration allows you to acknowledge and resolve your PagerDuty incidents from within Slack.

Note: This guide is for our Slack V1 integration, please visit this guide if you would like to use our current Slack V2 integration. This version also complements our Slack to PagerDuty integration guide.

In PagerDuty

1. In the Configuration menu, select Services.
2. Select the service you where you would like to add the extension and click the Integrations tab.
3. Under the Extensions section, click + New Extension.
   
4.  Select Slack from the dropdown menu under Extension Type.
5. Enter in a name for your Extension.
6. Users in Slack that are not users in PagerDuty can acknowledge/resolve incidents in PagerDuty if you have any Slack user selected. If you do not want any Slack user to acknowledge/resolve or add notes to incidents unless they have a PagerDuty account, choose PagerDuty users only instead.
7. You can select which updates you want sent to Slack: Resolve, Acknowledgements, Assignment Changes, or Add Notes.
8. Click Authorize.
9. Select the channel to which you’d like PagerDuty to send messages and then Authorize the integration.
   
10. If you setup the integration on a private channel, go to your Slack channel and add the @pagerduty_slack_bot to your channel. 
    Now you’re done! 

FAQ

When a Slack user acknowledges, resolves, or add a note to a PagerDuty incident, how will the PagerDuty incident behave?

When a Slack extension is added to a channel, Slack users in that channel will be given the opportunity to sign into PagerDuty to associate their Slack and PagerDuty accounts. Whenever an incident is triggered, the trigger message in Slack will show an acknowledge button, a resolve button, and a button to add notes. Users who have associated their Slack and PagerDuty accounts will respond as their PagerDuty users when using these buttons, keeping records of their actions from Slack consistent with actions from other clients in your analytics. If they do not have permissions to respond in PagerDuty, they will be unable to respond in Slack. Optionally, users who have not associated accounts will be unable to modify the state of the incident.

I have the option to only allow Slack users that are also PagerDuty users to acknowledge/resolve or add notes incidents in Slack. How will the incident behave?

When you use the option to only allow PagerDuty users to acknowledge/resolve or add notes to incidents from Slack, they will be prompted to link their Slack user to the PagerDuty account. Once they have done that, any action they perform will show their PagerDuty user taking action on the incident. Users who have not linked their accounts yet will be unable to take action, and instead will be prompted again to link accounts.

I’ve already got a Slack webhook set up. How do I switch to the new integration?

In this case, you’ll set up the new extension the same way as outlined above, then you can delete the old webhook.

I enabled alerts for my service; how does this appear in Slack?

If alerts are enabled for a service with Slack, Slack will only update the incident_key. Slack doesn’t update based on alert, but it notifies other Slack users of incidents for an alert grouping based on incident_key. You can still ack or resolve an incident in Slack to update the incident status in PagerDuty.

If there are multiple alerts that are merged, the source incidents will appear as merged in Slack and will be updated as resolved with the resolved_reason as merged as well as the target incident number they are merged into.

Can I unlink my PagerDuty and Slack user after it has already been linked?

Yes. If you go to your PagerDuty user profile page, click to the User Settings tab, and you will see the option to unlink your user with your Slack user.

How do incident notes work with this extension?

The notes are synced bi-directionally. Notes added from Slack are sent to the PagerDuty incident, and notes added to the PagerDuty incident create a Slack notification.